I don’t think I’ve met a writer who doesn’t know what “Morning Pages” are—but just in case, here’s a footnote1.

I haven’t written Morning Pages in years, but reading Kathryn Craft’s new book, The Far End of Happy, reminded me of this practice. Kathryn’s main protagonist, Ronnie, is a freelance writer and an ardent morning-pager (although it’s not referenced as such). Ronnie frequently wakes early in order to “center herself” by journaling.

A long-suffering friend, this journal, taking everything she’d thrown at it. The questions. The tortured answers. The pros. The cons. Moments rich with beauty. The long slow death of a dream... Today, more than any other, in these last precious moments before her sons awoke, Ronnie needed the ink to offer up its ever-flowing possibilities.”
~ Kathryn Craft, The Far End of Happy ~

I have numerous excuses for not continuing with Morning Pages since motherhood ate my schedule (along with the dog’s homework), but I’m considering resuming a mini-version that proved useful when I was delivering two blog posts per week: writing one page longhand on a particular topic. Pre-kids, I would decide on the topic the night before, sleep on it, and then free-write the article when I woke. These days I’m lucky if I get to sleep on anything, let alone an idea, and I’m left with the longhand option because my darlings have appropriated my computer.

This time I’m toying with the idea of writing flash-fiction during my computer-gone time. That is, if I can write to the tune of the Peppa Pig theme song...

What about you? Do you still write Morning Pages? Do you manage three pages every day, or is that a stretch? Do you do them on the computer instead of by hand? Do you choose to write something you can use (a blog post or your wip) instead of stream of consciousness musings?

1 Morning Pages are the brain-child of writer and artist Julia Cameron. They are three pages written longhand of whatever enters the writer’s mind (the pages could even be filled with “I don’t know what to write” or shopping and to-do lists). The idea is to clear the mind of the mundane to prepare it for a session of real creative work. Eventually (Cameron contends a minimum of 90 days) the pages become both a journal of subconscious perspective and a brain-training system for sharpening focus and exercising free-writing.

No matter how crucial a scene may be to your plot, if it makes you go “ick”, don’t lead with it.

It seems obvious to me after it was pointed out, but at the time of writing and revising a particular story, it made sense to start at the “beginning”, even though I always found myself thinking and wanting to tell people, “Just wait until you get to Chapter Two. Chapter One’s not really how the story’s going to continue; it’s just establishing the start of the protagonist’s character arc.” Yeah. Lesson learnt.

Start with the first of your good bits (we’ll call this the “Just Wait Until... Point” or JWUP). These days of instant gratification and high-speed everything, an author has much less time than ever before to hook a reader. That doesn’t mean you should start in media res without orienting the reader first. The difference nowadays is that your orientation (a view of the characters’ “normal” before everything changes) can and should only be a few paragraphs at the most. The inciting incident, which needs to be compelling, must occur in the first page or two, or you risk being put down.

There’s an easy (“easy”) fix way to judge this for yourself: if your Amazon Look Inside sample breaks before it gets to the JWUP, cut your beginning until the break happens immediately after the JWUP.

My teen science-fantasy book, Madison Lane and the Wand of Rasputin, will be out later in the year - at this stage I anticipate September or October. This is a very first sketch for the cover illustration by the talented Sandra Salsbury.

Here is the blurb for the book:

Be careful what you wish for.

When Madison Lane is given a magic wand, she wishes for the thing she wants the most – or so she thinks. As she tries to reverse the consequences of her wish she is pulled into another world and a quest to compensate for using the Wand of Rasputin. It is there that she discovers the real, terrifying cost of making a wish. And how impossible it is to control her own thoughts. One more wish and she loses everyone and everything she loves.

And now someone else is after the wand. Someone who will stop at nothing to get it. Someone with an unfair advantage.

Please join my mailing list here (or by filling in the form to your right) if you would like to receive updates, sneak peeks, and other happy news 🙂

Beyond the murk
The ire of dragon long impaled on wretched lance
Encircled in a bitter trial.
Sacred heart and evil dance
And hemlock burns in desperate pale
Beyond and through the cries of night
Bewitched and thrice behove of light
Briton’s daughter-earth beyond
Fearless echo of their heart.Continue reading »

I'm in the revision phase of my middle grade fantasy novel. I love this part. Revision is layering. It's the search for symbolism and metaphor and meaning. It's digging into the richness of what I've written and discovering that my planning and outlining paid off when I allowed the writing of the first draft to flow organically.

This book stumped me for a while in the search for its theme. Almost unbelievably, it was staring me right in the face. I had to change two characters to find it, but the wealth of additional subtext that opened up was so worth the extra work. It forms part of one of the book's twists, so I don't want to reveal too much, but the main theme is "taking responsibility for what you create" - very apt for me right now, on many levels from my writing to raising my children. Last year was a hard one, parenting-wise, and my son and I need to do some revision on our relationship this year, too.Continue reading »

My daughter is nearly a year old, and has been walking for a month, and, thus, our motherbaby dyad is slowly coming to an end. Because of her reflux and the distress that lying horizontally has caused her, we have spent the year quite literally attached. This is how I managed to get all my editing done this year:

Hustle is a British TV show about a group of likeable con artists and the elaborate confidence tricks they pull. In addition to having criminals as the protagonists, the show also breaks other storytelling rules (like “never cheat your reader”) to great effect. Here are some ideas you could borrow to up the ante in your own stories.

When I was a young child a little girl called Fiona Harvey was kidnapped from the same town where I lived. Parents of that town - my parents, my friends' parents - clamped down on our freedom out of concern for our safety and taught us about "stranger danger" - as well they should have. I still walked home from school almost every single day, but things had changed.

My fears grew slowly. I travelled to the UK and felt able to take risks I wouldn't have dared to in the place where I grew up. I lost more innocence, not because I took those risks, but because others felt entitled to abuse my naivety simply because I had it. I took a lot of supposedly far bigger risks that had no negative consequences for me at all. Continue reading »

Am I the only one for whom the proverbial lightbulb takes several small clicks of the switch before it glows brightly enough to get my attention? Last year I read and reviewed Noah Lukeman's free ebook, How to Write a Great Query Letter. In it, Lukeman berates authors who spend years working on their manuscripts only to pound out sub-par query letters in one sitting. His opinion is that writers should spend as much time on the query letter as they do on writing the book. Click one of the light switch: Why does one have to waste so much precious writing time "crafting" a god-damn query letter? Oh, yes, I get that it is supposedly a work of art that showcases the writer's talent, abilities, and intelligence. But, really? I'm getting a bit jaded in my thirties. I'd rather write another book that could, hopefully, be read by many eager readers, than "showcase" my writing talent in a letter to one person who may not even exist*.Continue reading »